In January 2023, label Standard Deviation presented the project ‘Ridne’ — a series of five audiovisual works dedicated to Ukrainian cities at war. Now the team has announced the second season of the project, which will be presented together with Remote Control at a two-day special event called CTM Festival in London on October 21.
‘Ridne’ combines first-person videos shot in different Ukrainian cities with music by Ukrainian electronic artists. Announcing the project the Standard Deviation team explained that the latter are ‘closely connected to the respective place, whether it is their own hometown, a personal place of solace or a place that symbolizes something of their own experience of war’.
The second season of ‘Ridne’ covers four Ukrainian towns and villages that have been affected by the russian military: Bucha, Kherson, Zaporizhzhia and the village of Prudyanka in Kharkiv region.
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More about the episodes
Bucha native electronic musician xtclvr ‘reminisces his childhood in a city which has now become a symbol of the senseless russian atrocities. Most traces of the grim events that shocked the world in 2022 are now hidden away and cleaned up yet, a blood stain in the memory remains’, the episode description reads.
The duo Kadaitcha shows scenes of the full-scale invasion in Kherson. Kherson, which was de-occupied in November 2022, and the musicians’ hometown of Nova Kakhovka were flooded due to the Kakhovka dam demolition in June 2023. Today Nova Kakhovka remains under russian occupation, and Kadaitcha ‘imagine a future where we learn to live through these experiences’ in their work.
Producer human margareeta walks around her native Zaporizhzhia and shows familiar landscapes of the city. But after the ecocide that occurred because the russians destroyed the Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Plant, now ‘everything looks different’ there.
The last video of the second season of Standard Deviation was created in collaboration with ‘Livyj Bereh’ — a volunteer organization repairing homes damaged by the russian. The video was filmed by director Roman Himey, and the soundtrack was created by Crimea native musician noorj. The episode shows the work of ‘Livyj Bereh’ volunteers in the recently liberated village Prudyanka (Kharkiv region).
‘Meanwhile, noorj’s home, illegally occupied by russia in 2014, is yet to be freed. This work is a dedication to the hope of life restored, and to those who rebuild what was destroyed’, Standard Deviation explained.
The first season of the ‘Ridne’ project was presented as part of a special Standard Deviation program with Remote Control at Berlin’s annual CTM Festival in January.
Describing the project, Standard Deviation said that through the audiovisual content, the team wanted to ‘take viewers directly to Ukraine, where people continue to confront russia’s full-scale war’.
In the first five episodes, DJ tofudj narrated a video from Kyiv, showing life in the city under constant blackouts due to russian shelling. And multidisciplinary artist Diana Azzuz added music to a video shot on Ukraine’s border with Poland — in this way she ‘revisits the experience of her own escape’ after the outbreak of full-scale war.
The performance also featured Kharkiv artist Panghoud, Mykolaiv musician bsw, and Undo Despot from Odesa, who showed the life of their hometowns under the conditions of war and the consequences of russian aggression.
